Chapter 7 The Man Who Knows Everyone #2
“The islands, I think,” she says, taken aback.
“You speak Hakka, then?” he says, and she is startled to realize that not only has he changed language, but she can understand what he’s saying, mostly. His language is not quite the same as hers, but it’s close.
“Yes,” she says, cautiously. Trying to hide her shock. “Is that good?”
“Hmm. Maybe. There are not many Hakka speakers around, and the Japanese can’t make head or tail of it. Let me think about it.”
He scratches his cheek, paces a little, talks to his colleagues in a low voice.
She waits.
After a while, he comes back and says, “We will do a test. No letters, nothing written. I will give you a message in Hakka to remember, and at sundown you will go out at night and deliver it. The person you are supposed to meet will be expecting you, and will know what you are meant to say. If you get it wrong or do not turn up, no more chances.”
“I am listening,” she says, ears open and alert.
That night will live in her memory forever: a harrowing few hours of running, dodging, gasping. Every few steps she stops and whispers the message to herself again, because she doesn’t want to survive this horseshit only to forget the actual words.
Many ghosts ignore her, while some try to talk back when she speaks to them. She is clumsy in her dealings with them, but it is a start. And for the ones who do attack, Bao deals with them savagely. It works, more or less.
Somehow, she doesn’t die. Step by step, navigating across an unfamiliar neighborhood, Mei Chi staggers and stumbles her way to the designated house, repeating a nonsense message in Hakka to a baffled—and thoroughly amazed—woman at the other end.
When she returns back to Lau Yik’s at dawn, trembling yet utterly triumphant, he pays up and gives her an approving nod.
She dines well that night, on a whole roasted fish. No part of it goes to waste: she eats the skin, head, tail, and the juicy little eyes. The flesh is rich and soft, the skin crisp and dripping with grease. She drinks the juices and licks her fingers afterward.
She piles the bones on a shrine for the ghost cat to eat.
He can kill, but he cannot eat her food for sustenance if she does not mark it for the dead, and he needs feeding if she wants him to stick around.
Ghosts linger longer if fed, and she likes having him for companionship. As well, she needs his help.
Afterward, when they are both done, she curls in the corner of the room. Resistance fighters come and go, talking among themselves.
“Fighters” is an optimistic description.
They are men and women who object to the Japanese occupation, but few are military trained, and even fewer are truly fighting.
Instead, led by Lau Yik—a former schoolteacher, Mei Chi gathers—they pass along crucial information, and sometimes supplies, using Kowloon like a conduit for the handful of scattered resistance forces which still hold out in isolated pockets.
Most of the guerilla groups seem to be out in Sai Kung somewhere, which is not far from where she first came ashore.
As the night wears on, and the alcohol-induced moroseness kicks in, the mood drops slowly.
One particularly inebriated young man with scars across his face tries to sit down on a nearby chair.
He misses his seat and ends up slumped on the floor next to Mei Chi, staring unfocused at the ceiling above them.
“History will think we are ridiculous,” he says to her, gulping a mouthful of raw booze.
“Do you know that when the Japanese invaded, they had twenty thousand infantry coming across land, twenty thousand men coming from sea, and a battalion of fifty planes in the air? Guess what we had. Guess, guess!”
“I don’t know.” Mei Chi doesn’t really want to hear it, but she feels it would be wrong to walk away.
“Fourteen thousand men defending Hong Kong. Scattered, disorganized, not enough support. Our sea guns did not even face the right way.” Tears leak from the corners of his eyes. “One week. One week for the Japanese to capture the mainland!”
“What about the British?” she says, as much to get him to stop crying as anything else.
“What about them?” he mumbles, wiping his face on his sleeve.
“There were Americans, some British, some Canadians. They fought, and we cannot complain about that. But they died or have been captured, now, and their ghosts are as angry and lost as the Chinese ones.” A sobbing laugh.
“No, no. Not even ghosts. The Japanese banish our dead, with their Supernatural Forces Division. Have you see them? The soldiers kill, kill, kill. Then the division banish, exorcise, disperse the ghosts. Never in my life have I seen such a thing.”
“Hey, little brother,” Lau Yik says sharply. “Go to bed, you are drunk.”
When the young man protests, Lau Yik walks over, leverages him up, and firmly directs him toward a room to sleep it off.
When he comes back, Lau Yik addresses the room. “We cannot become trapped in our grief for what is lost,” he says. “Keep your eyes forward, my friends. Tomorrow is a new day.”
Tomorrow is a new day, Mei Chi whispers to herself, over and over. Tomorrow is a new day.